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Anti-nationalism
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Anti-nationalism denotes the sentiments associated with an opposition to the core sentiments of nationalism and related ideologies. The imposition of nationalism as a belief or identity system, particularly when in conflict with more established and self-sustaining identity choices, often based on freely chosen religious or cultural beliefs and practices can be understood to undermine the legitimacy of territory-based nationalism. Various forms of internationalism propose alternatives. They do not all necessarily oppose the concepts of countries, nation states, national boundaries, cultural preservation, and identity politics; for example, present-day multilateralism does not, whereas proletarian internationalism and various kinds of cosmopolitanism explicitly do so. Some anti-nationalists oppose all types of nationalism, including ethnic nationalism among oppressed minority groups. Variations on this theme are often seen in Marxist theory. Marx and Engels rejected nationalism as a whole, stating that, "the working men have no country". Many Trotskyists, however, such as Chris Harman, were critical of nationalism while advocating support for what they saw as progressive national struggles. Cases Anarchism has developed a critique of nationalism that focuses on nationalism's role in justifying and consolidating state power, domination, and wealth. Through its unifying goal, nationalism strives for centralization, both in specific territories and in a ruling elite of individuals, while it prepares a population for capitalist exploitation. Within anarchism, this subject has been treated extensively by Rudolf Rocker in Nationalism and Culture and by the works of Fredy Perlman, such as Against His-Story, Against Leviathan and The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism. In his Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life, Arthur Schopenhauer rejects nationalism, seeing it as an abandonment of personal identity. In his clarifying work, Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche unequivocally denounces nationalism in the strongest terms, describing it as "this most anti-cultural sickness and unreason there is, nationalism, this nervose nationale with which Europe is sick, this perpetuation of European particularism, of petty politics...a dead-end street." Søren Kierkegaard's philosophy is a criticism and vehement rejection of Christian nationalism. Notable anti-nationalists * Hannah Arendt * * George Carlin * Eugene Debs * Albert Einstein * Friedrich Engels * E. M. Forster * David Gascoyne * Emma Goldman * William Lloyd Garrison * Bill Hicks * Muhammad Iqbal * Ruhollah Khomeini * Søren Kierkegaard * John Lennon * Vladimir Lenin * Rosa Luxemburg * Karl Marx * Lewis Mumford * Friedrich Nietzsche * Madalyn Murray O'Hair * Sayyid Qutb * Carl Sagan * Arthur Schopenhauer * Olaf Stapledon * Rabindranath Tagore * Leo Tolstoy * Peter Tatchell * Thorstein Veblen * H. G. Wells * Virginia Woolf See Also
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